A musical tribute to the classic Beatles album but with The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton singing the songs – without much change or interpretation in delivery. This is what Robert Stigwood (producer of hit film musicals like Tommy, Saturday Night Fever and Grease) gambled on with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), resulting in a terrible folly of a musical. And yes, it is bad, but I was curious to see it, and it is entertaining to a degree in that I was continually wondering what the hell they were thinking (well, what drugs they were taking – and the answer, cocaine is what the Bee Gees have said was being used all around them on the set; the brothers Gibb were disgruntled and depressed during filming and after it was released). I was mainly surprised that the brothers Gibb and Frampton have no dialogue at all; the plot is narrated to us by George Burns and it’s just song after song (all the covers produced by Sir George Martin) with silent movie “comedy” acting in between. What a pay day it must have been to be a supporting actor on this, from Frankie Howard to Steve Martin, showing up for a few days to lip sync a Beatles tune and cashing in that sizable cheque. It’s also interesting to see a story created from the album that is its own new mythology (something about the magical instruments of Sgt Pepper being stolen) that is weirdly all American and lacking in all the British references of the Beatles songwriting. What I did enjoy: the campy way the band look at the camera when they sing “She’s so heavy”, Donald Pleasence’s sleazy record producer look, the glamorous costuming of Dianne Steinberg and Stargard, Alice Cooper being weird doing a trippy version of ‘Because’, Earth Wind and Fire turning in a good cover of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, and I didn’t mind Barry’s vocal run on ‘A Day In The Life’. But the ultimate high point was Billy Preston (the only person in the film to have played on a Beatles album) magically appearing from the sky and zapping everyone into happiness while singing ‘Get Back’ at the very end. I can’t really recommend this unless you have some curiosity about it – it’s a watchable disaster.
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